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Wednesday, 11 May 2011

Nothing Left

'The Left’ is fucked, so says the thinktank of that erstwhile poster boy of radical socialism Peter Mandelson.

POSTER BOY

The argument that the 'left’ ought to be on the up, but instead wallows amid the 'right's’ ascendency is, for Policy Network, one of the salient contradictions of the present crisis of capitalism.

The thinktank is not the first to spin this banality. I have overheard my favourite drunk mutter about it too - with greater eloquence - and in a less salubrious locale than that within which the European 'left' will find time to peruse it this week.

Of course the real contradiction is that which manifests itself from the frankly psychotic view that there is anything ‘left’ at all about the ‘left’ referred to in Policy Network’s delusional flyer.
The idea that the people ought viscerally to be throwing themselves into the arms of the ‘left’ is fine but for the fact that, in Britain at any rate, the ‘left’ of which Policy Network speaks exists only as a mask for the castrated puppy of unfettered capitalism that is the British Labour Party.
I am not the first to say this, indeed I have heard my favourite drunk mutter something similar: People don’t vote for the ‘left’ because, quite literally, there is NOTHING LEFT.